Samantha Leal
Samantha Leal is a freelance writer, editor, and content strategist whose food coverage sits inside a wider lifestyle beat, with service pieces built around expert voices and clear, usable advice. Her work spans food, drinks, wellness, beauty, travel, and money, giving her food stories a lived-in sense of how cooking, eating, and budgeting fit together day to day. She brings more than a decade of digital editorial experience at major lifestyle publications to her current freelance work, combining sharp packaging with accessible, plainspoken guidance.
Home cooking and kitchen know-how
At Good Housekeeping, Leal writes food pieces that decode ingredients and techniques for home cooks rather than focusing on restaurant trends. In her guide to cooking with beef tallow, she treats the rendered fat as an everyday tool, explaining its high smoke point and how it can be used for roasting, grilling, frying, and baking, with chefs walking readers through practical applications at the stove and in the oven. The piece breaks down what beef tallow is, how to render and store it, and where it works best in the kitchen, framing the ingredient as a versatile alternative to more familiar fats.
The format is typical of her food work: a reported explainer built on expert interviews, organized into clear sections and specific suggestions, aimed at home cooks who want confidence as much as recipes.
Food access and everyday generosity
Leal’s food coverage also reaches beyond the kitchen into questions of access and community support.
In her Good Housekeeping piece on making food pantry donations actually helpful, she focuses on how people stock pantries in ways that serve recipients’ real needs rather than clearing out unhelpful items from their own cupboards. The story is framed as guidance for everyday givers, moving through practical considerations and examples that make the concept of “useful donations” specific and actionable.
That attention to the lived experience of food - how ingredients move from store shelves to pantry bags to tables - distinguishes her from more narrowly recipe-focused writers on the food beat.
Drinks, travel, and the pleasures around the table
Drinks and travel are a constant thread in Leal’s portfolio, and they reinforce the way she writes about food as part of a larger experience. Contributor notes describe her as a travel, drinks, and beauty/style writer with a knack for finding the best places to eat and drink in any location, underscoring her interest in how hospitality and atmosphere shape a meal. She is known for exploring wine, spirits, and cocktails, including the stories and history behind classic drinks, which gives her food and drinks coverage a cultural dimension beyond ingredients alone.
Across outlets, she writes destination and lifestyle pieces that blend where to go, what to order, and how to enjoy it, making her a fit for stories that sit at the intersection of food, drinks, and travel.
Beauty, wellness, and money in the lifestyle mix
Leal’s broader lifestyle beat informs the way she frames food and health, often pairing culinary topics with wellness and habit-change. For Women’s Health, she writes service-first pieces such as guidance on how often to use body lotion, drawing on dermatologists to translate science into routines.
In a profile of Eiza González, she incorporates diet and anti-inflammatory foods into a larger narrative about health and strength, showing how food choices connect to long-term well-being.
At Oprah Daily, she tackles money and budgeting with a piece on simple ways to save without feeling pinched, reflecting the same practical tone she brings to food and pantry coverage. Her author bios across outlets consistently describe her as a lifestyle writer whose specialties include beauty, travel, drinks, food, wellness, and personal finance, and her career includes senior digital roles at wellness, fashion, and women’s lifestyle brands before moving fully into freelance work.
That combination of lifestyle breadth and service discipline means her food and drink pieces tend to carry a clear angle - wellness, budget, or pleasure - rather than sitting as stand-alone recipes or trend roundups.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.